Menu

Magazine

Archives

Reversa

How To Rid the Skin of Barnacles

ByDr. Gifford Jones

“Vanity, thy name is woman”, wrote the immortal bard William Shakespeare hundreds of years ago. He was right. I know, because two years ago I wrote a column dealing with “cosmeceuticals” and mentioned Reversa, a cream that helps aging skin. The avalanche of mail from female readers stunned me and gave the postman a backache.

So this week let’s forget about cholesterol and other depressing problems and talk about another cosmeceutical that gets rid of aging spots. Let’s hope it also alerts everyone to the dangers of excessive sun exposure and saves needless deaths from skin cancer.

The way our skin ages depends on several factors. The most controllable factor of all is “photo-aging”. Excessive exposure to the sun results in coarse, pebbly, rough wrinkled skin. But it also causes irregular pigmentation due to ultraviolet radiation.

The time clock also plays a major role in skin aging. Like ships, the skin acquires barnacles such as spots, lumps and bumps. None of us like it when we see these imperfections in the mirror and we sympathize with Shakespeare’s Macbeth when he remarked, “Out, damned spot, I say”.

Dr. Suzanne Gagnon, a noted Montreal dermatologist, says, ” The skin breaks down due to several factors. In the top layers of the skin each individual cell is held together by a substance like the mortar that binds bricks together. Deeper, collagen and elastin make the skin flexible. And as years pass the mortar becomes less efficient and the collagen-elastin system is in short supply so the skin becomes thin and wrinkled.”

This is why women’s antennas lit up when I wrote about Reversa corrective night cream. This skin cream contains glycolic acid that helps to shed the outer layer of aging skin. It also has an anti-wrinkle micro-collagen along with vitamin C that acts to regenerate collagen and elastin. It’s a far cry from grandmother’s cold cream.

Another cream, Reversa UV, carries skin care a step further and may be the answer for many of my patients. The ones who point out brown spots on their skin to me, wondering why they’ve suddenly appeared, and begging me to get rid of them. These imperfections are often referred to as sun spots, age spots or liver spots. And they’re usually first noticed by women over 40 years of age.

Age spots are due to an abnormal increase in the amount of melanin in the epidermal layer of skin. Since melanin production is stimulated by an enzyme, tyrosinase, the goal is to decrease the activity of this enzyme.

Reversa UV anti spot cream contains Rumex, which is very effective in inhibiting tyrosinase. It’s an extract derived from plants native to the Canadian prairies with a long botanical history as a medicinal agent for the skin, a good choice for cosmetics due to its scarcity of side effects.

To increase the moisture level of the skin Reversa UV anti spot cream also contains hyaluronic acid, glycerine, vitamin E and panthenol. And to protect against further ultra-violet damage from the sun, the cream also contains UVAUVB sunscreen (made by the original formulators of Ombrelle). These are important additions because the sun causes brown spots faster than any agent can de-pigment the skin.

Remember there’s no harm in a touch of vanity. By using these two creams we might all retain healthy and more attractive skin. This makes more sense than lining up for Botox injections that only last a few months or submitting to plastic surgery. I believe these measures represent the height of human folly.

What’s more hazardous is ignoring medical pleas to guard against excessive sun exposure. This is why death from malignant melanoma is at an all time high.

Since I’m not a dermatologist I’ll no longer look foolish when patients point to aging spots and ask me what to do. Perhaps I’ve also retained a little beauty in this country and that’s not a bad idea. But, above all, I’m preaching sun sense that will save lives.

W. Gifford-Jones M.D is the pen name of Dr. Ken Walker graduate of The Harvard Medical School. He’s been a ship’s surgeon, hotel physician and family doctor and later trained in surgery at McGill in Montreal, University of Rochester N.Y. and Harvard. His medical column is published by 60 Canadian newspapers and several in the U.S. He is the author of seven books. Dr. Walker has a medical practice in Toronto. His Web site is: http://www.mydoctor.ca/gifford-jones

Pursuant to Title 17 U.S.C. 107, other copyrighted work is provided for educational purposes, research, critical comment, or debate without profit or payment. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for your own purposes beyond the 'fair use' exception, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.

Views are those of authors and not necessarily those of Bogota Free Planet. Content is Copyright 2011 the individual authors.